[Lazarus] documentation snapshot

Marco van de Voort marcov at stack.nl
Sun Apr 21 13:05:27 CEST 2013


On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 09:23:30AM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> > Unless your internet goes down... like what happened to me on Thursday.
> > And I live in a first world country (finally) - but not even such
> > countries are immune to internet outages.
> 
> First world? I thought you were in England? **

Location has nothing to do with it. For work, I visit a lot of factories,
and while some might have some wireless in office area, the workfloor has
none.  And even if they have, if one only visits occasionally, getting
credentials is usually too bureacratic.

Mobile internet reception is also flakely (usually have to go outside to get
some signal due to steel in the structure, if you are permitted to take a
phone into the factory begin with. Since the advent of camera phones,
wanting that marks you as an industrial spy it seems). 

Don't get me wrong, for serious cases we always manage to get connected, but
it requires effort and time. (permissions, going outside etc) It is not
something you do to look up what %xxx to use in a format() argument string
that you might not use everyday.

Moreover in general as a small western country, the Netherlands is
considered as quite decently connected, specially wrt mobile coverage.

> Leaving aside the performance issues, I think that the one area in which 
> online docs are pretty much indispensable is that in principle they 
> allow user annotation. However I think a big question is the extent to 
> useful contributions could be folded back into the original XML (or 
> whatever) without an inordinate load on the maintainers.

Since both CHM and INF viewers are under our control, it is not a real
problem to begin with.
 
Anyway, can we _please_ all agree that we need both online and offline docs.
I think the proponents of online docs better work on improving the
online experience, rather than declare it perfect ex ante.	





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